sábado, 18 de agosto de 2012

The Gulf Stream and The Next Ice Age

In the battle against climate change there is no enemy to fight, just our attitudes." (Nicolas Koutsikas, Director, The Gulf Stream & the Next Ice Age)

Climate Change is hot on the political and social agenda internationally. Our climate is changing, with industrial production, habitat, transport and everyday human activities acknowledged as causes of global warming.

The Gulf Stream and the Next Ice Age is a one-hour documentary which explores the results of a recent American government report that believes the collapse of thermohaline circulation will take place around the year 2010 and impose a minor ice age on Europe. Could Dublin acquire a climate like Spitzberg, and London like that of Siberia?

The Gulf Stream is a powerful surface current, driven by the Trade Winds. Its origins lie in the Gulf of Mexico and it carries the tropical waters from the Florida Strait to the great banks of the United States, where it heads eastward, carrying its warm waters to the borders of the North Atlantic. As soon as the tropical waters hit the Arctic Ocean, they cool abruptly and plunge towards the abyssal zone to form a loop, known as "thermohaline circulation." Then, like an immense conveyor belt that slows down in the ocean depths, it sets out again southward to rejoin the beginning of the Gulf Stream.

"How the Media Frames Political Issues" by Scott London

In The Emergence of American Political Issues (1977) McCombs and Shaw state that the most important effect of the mass media is "its ability to mentally order and organize our world for us. In short, the mass media may not be successful in telling us what to think, but they are stunningly successful in telling us what to think about."[13] The presidential observer Theodore White corroborates this conclusion in The Making of a President (1972):

The power of the press in America is a primordial one. It sets the agenda of public discussion; and this sweeping political power is unrestrained by any law. It determines what people will talk and think about - an authority that in other nations is reserved for tyrants, priests, parties and mandarins.[14]

McCombs and Shaw also note that the media's tendency to structure voters' perceptions of political reality in effect constitutes a bias: "to a considerable degree the art of politics in a democracy is the art of determining which issue dimensions are of major interest to the public or can be made salient in order to win public support."[15]http://www.scottlondon.com/reports/frames.html